If you want to get up to speed on the news that affects you as a developer, I Programmer Weekly is a digest of our news, book reviews and articles written by programmers, for programmers. This one covers October 18th to 24th.

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Programmer Puzzles

Towers of Hanoi is a classic puzzle and is often used to illustrate the idea of recursion. Here Melvin Frammis challenges you to attempt to find solutions to some variations - but first he explains the original version.

The latest beta of Firefox has a new facility that might puzzle many. The social API allows developers to integrate social networks into the browser. The real question is why is this part of the remit of a browser at all?

The patent office has seen fit to agree that Apple "rubber-banding" patent is silly, using the technical term "invalid". This is good news, but the bad news is that a prior patent is part of the reason.

Mono 3.0 has been released with a complete C# 5.0 compiler with asynchronous programming support, improved garbage collection and the incorporation of Microsoft's open-source framework for Web development.

Udacity has details of four courses that are now open for enrollment and will start in early 2013, plus titles of three others that will follow at a later date. They also signal a slight shift in emphasis.

Poland's parliament has launched a campaign to restore justice to the Polish men and women who first broke the Enigma codes, but who have tended to be overlooked with the limelight going to the Bletchley Park codebreakers.

Every programmer likes a good self reference, a recursion, a bootstrap - but this one is mind-boggling. We have an implementation of Conway's game of life in Conway's game of life. Or put more simply Life in Life.

NaCl is one of the many things that makes Chrome stand out amongst browsers. Now Google has released a debugger addin for Visual Studio in an effort to make it even easier to create native applications.

The Core

Programmers are master logicians - well they sometimes are. Most of the time they are as useless at it as the average joe. The difference is that the average joe can avoid logic and hence the mistakes. How good are you at logical expressions and why exactly is De Morgan your best friend, logically speaking?

If we are going to make web apps as powerful as native apps we are going to have to explore some of the less well known areas of HTML5. In this article the main topic is how to take a photo, but we also learn a lot about the file API.

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